Small Fry Page 15

  He seemed to need us, and this was flattering. Even though in his sadness he was remote and hardly spoke, we were the ones he came to when life was dire—when Tina was gone. Sometimes he came over and took a nap on our couch. This feeling of being needed was what I missed when he and Tina got back together a week or two later.

  He did not want to be our protector, but he dabbled in it. The more he approached and pulled away, the more I wanted him to spread a vast, fine net below us.

  I don’t remember seeing Tina much during this time. It became harder for me to muster joy at the reunions, knowing that a crash would follow soon. I overheard my mother and Ilan talking about how NeXT wasn’t going well either, and I knew that if NeXT failed and he and Tina really broke up, he might collapse with grief. I was terrified for him.

  “I wrote a song for Tina,” he said, one night when my mother had a date with Ilan and I went to stay with him at the Woodside house. “You wanna hear it?”

  I sat on the couch to listen. He didn’t turn on the lights but there was some moonlight from the windows. I didn’t know he could play anything but “Heart and Soul.”

  He sat down at the piano in the semidark, cavernous ballroom. I don’t remember much of the song anymore, his voice and his notes were very loud and clear and rang through the room. I couldn’t believe he could play so well, and sing so well. Afterward he wanted to know what I thought, and I had a hard time convincing him of the truth—he kept asking again and again—that it was beautiful, and sad. At some point he gave Tina a tape, but then he took the tape back.

  When he and I were in the car together a week later, he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Any other guy would snatch her up in a second.”

  It wasn’t just him but other adults, too, who sometimes treated me as if I were another adult, asking me for advice, telling me about their feelings and wishes, confiding in me about their relationships in ways they must have known I couldn’t understand. Their love lives, they called them. None was married yet; not my father, my mother, Mona, or Tina, and I was often the only other person around; it was natural that they sometimes talked to me. I listened and thought, if it were me, I’d live life better, avoid the mistakes, the drama. I listened closely and dispensed advice and figured I’d have an advantage when I was older myself.

  “Maybe you should figure out if you like her,” I said to him.

  A couple of weeks later Steve and Tina were back together and we three walked down University Avenue on Saturday afternoon, Tina and I flanking him, on the way to lunch at the Good Earth. Inside the door came a blast of air that smelled of the proprietary tea blend—cinnamon, cloves, orange, ginger. The tables, chairs, benches, and uniforms were all in dreary shades of brown to communicate heath food. A line of vinyl-upholstered chairs ran the length of the bar.

  “Lis, you’re gonna remember this,” my father said loudly and with solemnity, as if I was the designated record-keeper. NeXT was fine, Tina was here, I was here. The sunlight was so bright it erased the spots it hit. He said this phrase a lot when he and Tina were back together, confusing his swell of emotion for mine. I wondered if I would.

  These days I alternated between pitying him and being in his thrall. He was tiny and weak, then vast and impenetrable, big and out of scale. These two impressions flipped back and forth in me, not touching.

  A homeless man walked toward us on the sidewalk. He had long segments of brown-gray hair falling against the sides of his face, but the top of his head was bald. A red T-shirt hugged a large, round gut. As he walked, his mouth gaped open and snapped shut, like a fish’s. He had only a few teeth left.

  “That’s me in two years,” my father whispered to us.

  He said this often, pointing to a variety of old men who lived in the town and sat on curbs with dirty hair and dirty, weather-beaten faces. Some looked like they were wearing diapers. He couldn’t look like these men in two years if he tried. It was as if his comparison was also to say, Look how far I am from him. Or: Not really.

  Or else he said it to try to remind himself that he was no different from anyone else, no better.

  “Yeah, right,” I said, to make him laugh.

  My mother and I went for a few days to a place called Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist retreat with natural hot springs, where she would be what was called a guest student and do work during the day in exchange for a small, less luxurious cabin than the other guests stayed in. Our cabin was up a long series of small steps made of wooden blocks inserted into the hillside. When it rained one day, the dirt and wood on the path up to our cabin became slippery, and there was nothing to hold on to, and we scrambled up, complaining and laughing.

  During the days, she swept and peeled vegetables in the kitchen while I roamed around, making friends, swimming, and making concoctions with the free coffee, ice, and milk in glass mugs at the beverage bar brought out in the afternoons. Around the pool’s concrete lip, thirsty bees alighted to drink the wet spots that formed when people got out, and I was careful not to step on them.

  “Are you allergic?” a woman asked.

  “It swells up and I can’t walk.”

  “And where’s your mother?” she asked.

  “She’s working.” I burned with the desire to let this woman know that I wasn’t just any girl staying in an inferior cabin far away but someone who mattered.

  “And your father?”

  “He’s not here. He’s—he—runs a company,” I said.

  “What company does he run?” she asked.

  “It’s called NeXT.”

  She looked at me more carefully, studying my face, and I knew she’d understood that I wasn’t just a girl by the pool avoiding bees, I was a kind of princess in disguise. “I know who your father is,” she said. “But I heard his company failed.”

  “When did you hear that?”

  “I read it in the paper a couple days ago,” the woman said. “NeXT failed.”

  We’d left him; he’d failed. He would perish.

  He’d been talking about a NeXT presentation that was coming up in a month or so and how the “demo” wasn’t working. “If it doesn’t work, the presentation’s gonna tank,” he’d said.

  “I have to go,” I said. We needed to get home right away. I had to convince my mother to take us; I had to convince her without letting her know that I’d told someone who my father was. If she knew I was advertising his name, she’d worry I’d endanger myself, worry while she worked.

  I ran along the tree-shrouded dirt path to the place my mother said I should go, to the building that housed the kitchens.

  “We need to leave,” I said when I found her. “I want to get home. I’m worried about Steve.”

  “Why, honey?”

  “I heard NeXT failed.”

  “How did you hear that?”

  “A woman said it was in the papers.”

  “What woman?”

  “A woman here.” I imagined him crumpled over, needing us as we blithely passed our days where he couldn’t reach us. We were all he had—I was all he had—and I’d left him. Remorse felt like suction in my stomach. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me how the conversation went.

  “Let’s call him first,” she said.

  A pay phone was attached to the wall of a building. She dug out a quarter and found his work number. I dialed, worried the line would be defunct, my heart in my throat.

  He picked up.

  “Hi,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yup,” he said.

  “Is work okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “No reason,” I said.

  And then he had to get off the phone and we said goodbye, my throat still aching with what felt like desperate love.

  A few months later we were going to see his NeXT presentation at Davies Symphony Hall. He’d been preparing for months and I knew he was nervous, especially about the demo, where he’d show how the computer worked in real time.

  I wore a dark blu
e corduroy dress with a red ribbon sash that my mother and Mona said they preferred, even though I would have liked to wear something cooler. The pink light and cold wind in San Francisco that morning whipped at my face and blazed on the glass surfaces of buildings.

  We were directed down the curving drive where other cars could not go. A woman in black stockings gave us laminated tags with clips and walked us to our seats near the front in the huge theater. Huge banners on the sides of the stage rippled and caught light, a NeXT logo in the center of each. In the middle of the huge stage was a desk, a computer, a bottle of water, and a chair. When I thought of how he’d feel if he failed in front of all these people, it felt like acid in my stomach. People were filing into the seats behind me, expectant, their sounds more muffled and pointed than sounds in the world, the acoustic properties of the cavernous room softened by thousands of thick velvet seats.

  Barbara came over, carrying a clipboard. “Do you want to go backstage and see your dad?” My mother nodded yes. I felt as if I was about to view a great secret. People in the theater would probably notice I was walking alone toward the stage. I could feel eyes on my back; it made me walk straight, and step carefully.

  Barbara held open a thick velvet curtain, the dark space inside subdivided into velvet rooms. In one was my father, standing, surrounded by other people. He was wearing a suit and looked more polished than usual. He did not seem particularly anxious. He noticed me and smiled.

  “Good luck, Steve,” I said.

  “Thanks, champ,” he said, and then walked back into the velvet darkness of the rooms. I followed Barbara back out through the curtain. I was terrified the demo would fail and wanted him to know it was okay with me if he failed. Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” filled the huge room. The uneven horns set my nerves on edge. Toward the front, waiting for me, were my mother, Tina, Mona, my father’s father Paul, and my father’s sister Patty. It was the only time I saw Tina wearing makeup or a dress. She seemed uncomfortable, too tall, rustling, striking. I sat beside my mother.

  Our part darkened, his lit up. He walked out, seeming more at home and natural than he’d been a moment before, as if being on stage was easier than being in life. When he sat down at the desk, his small screen projected on a huge screen above, I knew it was the moment he might fail and the computer might freeze and humiliate him.

  He announced that there was a whole dictionary, and the complete works of Shakespeare, inside each computer. He looked up a quote about books and brooks from As You Like It. I’d never heard him talk about dictionaries or Shakespeare before. After that he created a three-dimensional shape in a window on the screen, a cylinder or tube with a bouncing molecule inside. Below it, he added a virtual button that compressed the container to make the molecule bounce faster. He made another button that added heat. It moved faster still. All the shapes moved in a smooth way; they did not catch and stutter the way moving images did on my computer when I dragged them from one side of the screen to the other. Whatever pixels made up the image were much finer than I’d seen on a computer before; they did not granulate with motion. And then, unexpectedly, he made another button, clicked it, it was sound, and the rhythm of the dancing molecule was all around us resounding through the hall, miraculous.

  “See? Look what we can do here,” he said, moving the window around the desktop that contained the tube that held the molecule that continued to bounce, and affecting nonchalance, as his voice was drowned out by thunderous applause. People stood up to clap behind me. I clapped with relief. It had worked. Soon, we were all on our feet.

  He was smiling, as if he both hoped and didn’t hope the applause would stop—and stood there on the stage before us, everyone’s man.

  At the start of fifth grade at my new school, I had planned to become popular. At my old school I’d noticed a few popular girls; at my new school I wanted to be one. The summer before, at the bead shop, I discovered a pair of large plastic loops that could be attached to metal hooks, making cheap, sexy earrings that would later be the cause of bitter fights between me and my mother, who found them too provocative.

  In the mornings before school my new friends and I congregated in the girls’ bathroom off the hallway, leaning over Silly Putty–colored sinks to get close to the mirror, sharing mascara, hair spray, and lip gloss. With hair spray and water I sculpted my bangs into a glossy wave.

  I slipped into a miniskirt meant to be a neck cowl from a shop called Units, the happy accident of repurposing I’d discovered in the changing room, and, finally, I put on the pair of dangly earrings I wasn’t allowed to wear. They swayed with alternating rhythms, reflecting light from the smooth plastic surface, elongating my round face into a more womanly shape. I snuck them to school in my backpack, along with everything else I wasn’t allowed to wear.

  The part that kept me wearing clothing my mother didn’t allow and adults didn’t like was related to the smell of lipstick and hair spray and the pendant quality of earrings. It was sex—not the act, but the awareness and excitement of something new I felt around me like a force. It was a switch that had flipped, unexpected and powerful.

  Adults seemed to think academic work was most important, but I figured that was because they didn’t understand the greater satisfaction of being popular, perhaps because they were too old or ugly to be popular themselves, and were jealous. I felt this way about my mother too, so her rules about clothing and earrings seemed like a bitter wish to stop me from having what she could not have.

  I dressed provocatively on purpose, but when I was with any adults I admired who disapproved of me, I felt that they had seen into my soul and that there was something lascivious and wanton about me, impossible to mend. A wickedness my friends would never possess. Once I’d stayed for a night with my aunt Linda at her condo in Fremont.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

  “I’d like to,” I said. She played me her favorite song: “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.”

  “What’s your favorite?” she asked.

  “I don’t know if I can tell you,” I said. “It’s by George Michael.”

  “Which song?”

  “‘I Want Your Sex,’“ I said. She scowled and looked away.

  At Nueva we sometimes had class in the library. The library was an open room at the end of two parallel hallways, a series of low shelves with books on both sides. In the middle were three couches around a chair where we sat while Debbie, the librarian, read to us from a book about the components of toothpaste, which turned out to be mostly chalk, the chalk itself made from the bones of marine creatures that lived thousands of years ago, died, sank to the bottom of oceans, and were compressed, then ground up. Debbie was tall and handsome with short, brown pixie-cut hair and thick gold-rimmed glasses. She wore long corduroy skirts. Her skin was a waxy layer of white on top of red, and when she became angry, the red bloomed through to the surface.

  When she finished reading out loud, we were supposed to read quietly to ourselves.

  I was not interested in books; I wanted to talk with Catie and Kate and Elena, who followed the rules and didn’t talk, unless I was with them. I was an indifferent student and lured my friends into fooling around with me. For this reason Debbie singled me out for censure.

  I put a book on my lap as a prop and whispered to Catie and Kate. We sat at the farthest area from Debbie, with our backs to the shelves and our legs out, elbow to elbow, whispering the in-breaths, making consonants with a light clicking sound.

  It seemed impossible that Debbie could hear us from that distance, but there she was, towering above us, blooming red.

  “Lisa,” she said, pointing to a new patch of carpet, too far to talk. “You sit there.”

  In the library, now isolated from my friends, I picked a book at random from the shelf and opened it up to find pictures of naked women, drawn in exacting detail, down to the patches of hair and the bumps on the nipples.

  I moved farther away to another corn
er, holding the book against my side so that if Debbie looked up, she would see it only in profile. I sat on the floor, opened it up, and leaned over to look. My heart raced: in the middle of the book across the two center pages were five drawings of the same woman moving through the stages of physical maturation.

  In the pictures her breasts swelled and her nipples became larger. As the hair on her body took on a definite shape, the wavy hair on her head went from long to short. She began without glasses but acquired them in the fourth picture, kept them in the fifth. One of her feet was angled to the right in the same way in all the pictures. She smiled unself-consciously, as if unaware she was naked, like a paper doll poised for a business meeting before the clothes are cut out and attached.

  The sequence was like the charts I’d seen of the evolution of man, from the chimpanzee to the profile of Homo sapiens in final form, heading off the page, bound for civilization. He began hirsute but ended almost hairless; this woman’s progression was in reverse. She ended with hair but started putty-colored, chromatically unified except the nipples and the hair on her head, like me. And while the final man seemed to look out at possibilities beyond the page, the final woman was planted, hips wide and square, smiling like she wanted to stay where she was.

  I knew that grown women had pubic hair, breasts, and hips. But I didn’t know the stages in between, and it was this becoming, more than the first or last version, that gave me a feeling of disgust and excitement. I wanted to mock it, but also to keep on looking.

  “Elena, look!” I whispered when she walked by.

  “Oh, wow,” she said, sitting down beside me.

  “Shhh,” I said, and looked over the bookshelf at Debbie, who was talking with another teacher.